1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method and software architecture for blocking email spams, and more particularly, to a method and software architecture that are implemented in a computer host to block email spasm.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic mails (or “emails”) have become a privileged way of communication between people since they can be distributed rapidly at low cost through diverse communication networks such as Internet network. Internet and email popularization has made electronic messages very attractive as marketing and advertisement media. As a result, it is not uncommon now for a user of emails to receive unsolicited electronic mails (commonly called “spams” or “junk mails”) from unknown originators along with legitimate and regular email messages from identifiable authors.
An email user may not desire the dissemination of email spams in regard of many considerations. Email spams may carry unsolicited advertisements such as financial or commercial advertisements, or objectionable, fraudulent or dangerous content such as pornography, hate propaganda and the like. Substantial time may be spent to open the spam and follow up on its advertising content. In the process of deleting the junk mails, the user further may inadvertently discard or overlook other important messages. Aside unsolicited advertisements, email spams further can constitute a serious security problem because it may carry viruses or dangerous execution codes susceptible of damaging the computer host.
Spam authors (or “spammers”) use two primary techniques to disseminate unsolicited email spams, which are the relaying technique and the directing technique. Relaying technique uses intermediate sites to relay the spam from the spammer. These relay sites usually are open sites without sufficiently strict system administration practices, which allow uncontrolled spam relaying to a large number of addresses. Since using SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) from a PC provides the ability to forge emails, spam or junk mails alternatively may be also directly sent from a dialup PC to a recipient host.
Despite efforts have been made in the past to combat spam dissemination, more developments however are needed to effectively block email spams at the recipient computer host.